I have always believed that all things depended upon Fortune, and nothing upon ourselves.
Outside books, we avoid colorful characters.
Eugene is located in western Oregon, approximately 278 billion miles from anything.
Just as once upon a time you could make the experience of religion or nature a great metaphor, so now it is with love. It's just not the kind of thing you can put at the center of a work of literature and have it really reveal us to ourselves.
While fools shun one set of faults they run into the opposite one.
The Russian yearning for the meaning of life is the major theme of our literature, and this is the real point of our intelligentsia's existence.
I can't think of any other job in journalism where the newsmakers come to you.
Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.
[Alfred] Hitchcock was very interested in the image on the screen. As is any good cinema director. That is the language they speak. It is not literature, it is images on screen.
The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.
It has become evident that the primary lesson of the study of evolution is that all evolution is coevolution: every organism is evolving in tandem with the organisms around it.
I first came out against Castro in June 1968, fifteen months after my book had been published, and you cannot imagine how quickly a void was created around me
Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.
The Irishman in English literature may be said to have been born with an apology in his mouth.
The truth doesn't have to do with cruelty, the truth has to do with mercy.
Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.
The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.
Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, throwing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up.
Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes.
I wrote because I needed to and wanted to. It never occurred to me that I'd become famous.